Waiting for Godot

In Samuel Beckett’s modernist classic, Waiting for Godot, waiting for the mysterious magician of salvation is a timeless and fruitless venture. Everybody knows in their heart of heart that Godot will not come. Yet they are all compelled to wait. The alternative is too bleak to contemplate, for it simply means that in a thoroughly blighted world, there is even no hope for hoping. Things had fallen completely apart. The centre was no longer holding.

Waiting for Godot is a deeply unoptimistic play about the human condition. It is a vision of human society rent asunder; of the universe as a moral void brimming with cosmic futility. There are no heroes, only antiheroes who have forsworn any heroic gesture. Unlike the more expansive canvas of earlier theatre, the modernist canvas of the Absurd is stripped bare. There are no rhetorical flourishes. The cast is pared down to a minimal and minimalist three who babble unintelligible nonsense. In order to relieve the boredom and sheer ennui of waiting for Godot, the audience is compelled, like the captive victims of an ancient mariner, to make sense of utter nonsense; of relentless and unremitting fatuity.

Samuel Beckett, together with Eugene Ionesco and Franz Kafka, could be described as the classic literary figures of the Age of Anxiety in which the values that undergirded human societies appear to have collapsed and the old God seemed to have disappeared completely. In his post-prison incarnation, Soyinka, philosophically speaking, came very close to this frame of mind, particularly in Madmen and Specialists.

These writers do not even pretend to offer hope to stricken humanity. According to Ionesco, everybody must lift themselves up by the bootstraps or fall into the yawning pit. Several times, it has been hinted that Godot himself is a trope for a God that had disappeared forever. There is no paddy for jungle, as they say.

As this column never tires of explaining, there are times when literature imitates life in its haunting and unforgettable realism. But there are also times when life imitates literature in its grand fictional sweep. There is a lot about contemporary Nigerian political life to remind one of the Theatre of the Absurd. Just as the Theatre of the Absurd mirrors a world that has gone out of joints, a world in which God has disappeared and societal values have collapsed, The Theatre of Political Absurdism is a reflection of a society in which all the institutions girding political norms have collapsed and people are subject to the whims and caprices of individuals without the moral and intellectual capacity for leadership.

It is a minimal and minimalist society. Just as everything is pared down to the minimum in the Theatre of the Absurd, in the State of Political Absurdism everything is also pared down and the state is stripped of all resources including human assets. It is the age of minimal generals, minimal statesmen, minimal politicians, minimal philosophers, minimal economists and minimal clerisy. Mediocrity is magnified while real virtue comes miniaturized.

In order not to further inflame political passions, it is important to reach beyond surface manifestations to get at the root and latent contents of contemporary political developments in Nigeria. By so doing, we may strip ourselves and a sadistic post-colonial state of any illusions about its ameliorative possibilities under current circumstances and conditions. Subsequently, we may be persuaded to come to terms with the harsh verdict that what the situation demands is radical surgery rather than cosmetic scaling.

If we are looking for evidence of state infirmity and its attendant political pathologies, we may have to look no further than the dramatic postponement of elections by a whole and walloping six weeks. Now let us be fair to all parties concerned. Election dates are not cast in stone and marble, but only up to a point. Shifting election dates particularly when the security situation is dire and darkly portentous is the right and rational thing to do.

But the shift ought to have been arrived at through elite consensus and an agreement by all parties involved. What makes the current postponement most galling and odious is that it was surreptitiously effected by a faction of the contending political elite and slammed down on the nation by despotic fiat. It is akin to the referee in a boxing match physically restraining one of the combatants while sanctimoniously asking them to get on with the fight. We all know where this kind of officiating has taken the country before.

In a truly functioning democratic set-up, it is inconceivable that a coterie of military officers and security kingpins, acting in concert with the presidency and a failed hegemonic party, could ignore the Council of State, the highest advisory organ in the nation, only to proceed to arm-twist the nation’s electoral Czar into supporting a predetermined agenda. It was a sad day for political sanity in Nigeria and a triumph for political absurdity. On this Council of State are at least four former military heads of state. If serving military hierarchs could hold their former commanders in such spiteful contempt, one must wonder what the immediate future portends.

Readers of this column would have noticed its deep reverence and admiration for the Nigerian military, no matter its human errors of judgement and lapses of the past. Although a creation of colonial subjugation, the army is the first and last national institution standing. No efforts must be spared to save it from itself and from the current beneficiaries of institutional disorder.

The reasons given for the postponement would have made Samuel Beckett, the master of Absurdist formulations, wince and grimace in ironic admiration. It is a litany of shameless bêtise which has brought the nation further international ridicule and global obloquy. It is not the first time the military have given a timeline for crushing the Boko Haram menace. If the military kingpins are now buoyed up by the arrival of international troops on Nigeria’s sacred and sacrosanct territory, it is an admission that the once almighty Nigerian army could no longer pass muster.

On the objective plane, the real effect of the postponement will be to give the ruling party a momentous boost in the war of attrition with its main rival. It is the politics of exhaustion. Given its limited resources, it is difficult to see how the opposition can keep up the campaign for another four weeks with the same verve and vigour. Somebody may yet make a fatal campaign slip. The punitive physical regimen may occasion a catastrophic clanger. The dangerous interval may become a ruinous interlude as extra-constitutional forces sniff a stalemate. It is akin to shifting polling posts at the eleventh hour which could induce messianic hallucinations in a few.

As if by some poetic justice, the stated reasons for the postponement are beginning to explode in the face of those who gave them. A week after the postponement, and going by their own logic, the security situation has worsened considerably. Only this can explain the brazen intimidation, the psychological destabilization and the military siege on the residence of main opposition leaders. Bourdillon is now synonymous with Boko Haram. It reminds one of an American general in Catch 22 who stated bluntly to his military subordinates that his major objective was not how to finish off the Japanese but how to neutralize his main military rival.

No matter the angelic mien, the sweet boyish smiles, the dissimulating panache, the serpentine charms and base low-minded cunning, Goodluck Jonathan should know by now that except with his hard core supporters, he has exhausted his credit and stock of goodwill with most Nigerians. For a man who started out with such a huge swell of pan-Nigerian good will and affection, this is the real tragedy of his tenure. No matter what he says or does not say, he will come across as a master-dissembler, a Machiavellian zero-summer who does not give a damn about the fate of the country he owes so much.

For veterans of what has now become a permanent struggle against evil governance in post-independence Nigeria, you can always tell when a ruler has offended the deep sensibility of Nigerians, when he has injured their sense of fairness and what is right. You always know when majority of Nigerians have crossed The Rubicon. That hour is now at hand. How many more times can the day of judgement be postponed? The answer no longer resides with the Nigerian political elite. It is now in the seething streets.

As for Attahiru Jega, it is now most unlikely that he will finish his tenure without some tarnishing of reputation and besmirching of hard earned integrity. He will be in distinguished company. The Nigerian electoral throne is the graveyard of reputations. The stakes are so high, and when mud is thrown so hard some of it is bound to stick. A man of Jega’s stoic and saturnine temperament would have been quietly affronted by the ferocity and velocity of the allegations hurled at him, particularly by wild old men who have no further reputation to protect.

To be sure, there is a school of thought which holds that Jega’s languid and lackadaisical hauteur is particularly ill-suited for a job which requires constant staginess and some showmanship. This is neither here nor there. There can be no doubt that in moments of grave crisis, Jega’s unruffled self-assurance can be quite becalming for a nation constantly on edge.

But to appropriate Durkheim, whenever a sociological phenomenon is explained away by a psychological parameter, we can be sure that the explanation is false. The problem about our electoral system is not about the personality type of the chairman of the commission but of a background institutional crisis which will not ignore us however much we choose to ignore it. There is a touch of poetic irony to Jega’s current difficulties which ought to teach our political elite some hard lessons about the dangers of political opportunism.

It will be recalled that Jega himself had been part of the Uwais Panel on electoral reform. It was a public inquest into the worst electoral calamity visited on the country. One of the cardinal recommendations of that panel was that the presidency should be stripped of its power to nominate and appoint the chairman of the electoral commission. The responsibility should go to a Judicial Council.

The recommendation had hardly been submitted when Jega was appointed the chairman of the commission and he gladly accepted. It was a strategic gambit on the part of the ruling class which immediately squashed and squelched any possibility of a comprehensive electoral reform. Jega did not deem it fit to explain why he took the job against the recommendation of his own committee.

But there will always be a return of the repressed. It is this lingering institutional hiatus that has caught up with Jega with presidential interlopers swarming and calling for his head in very humiliating circumstances even as some of his shameless professional colleagues intrigue for the same thankless job..

We can continue to wait for Godot, but Godot will not come. This is why civilized societies give primacy to building strong and durable institutions rather than building the cult of strong, authoritarian personalities. The absence of the institutions we don’t build will eventually destroy the egoistic personalities we build. The theatre of political absurdity is not a funny place at all. Unhappy is the nation without visionary institution builders.

“Political institutions have a moral as well as structural dimensions. A society with weak political institytions lack the ability to curb the excess of personal and parochial desires. POLITICS IS A HOBBESIAN WORLD OF UNRELENTING COMPETITION AMONG SOCIAL FORCES– between man and man, family and family, clan and clan, region and region, class and class — a competition unmediated by more comprehensive political organisation.

What is Nigeria interest(s) at the CROSS-ROAD! The preservation of the state, or the public good of the entrapped nationalities- hmm!

“Hence the common phenomenon in preatorian politics of the ‘SELL-OUT’. In institutionalised systems, politicians EXPAND their localities from social group to political institution and political community as they mount the ladder of authority. In preatorian society the SUCCESSFUL politician simply TRANSFERS his identity and loyalty from one social group to another…….
A preatorian lacking COMMUNITY and EFFECTIVE political institutions can exist at almost any level in the evolution of political participation.”

“In a society without effective political institutions and UNABLE to DEVELOP them, the nef result of social and economic modernisation is POLITICAL CHAOS”
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